Testament Noweth

Translated by Nicholas Williams

Although the bulk of Cornish literature has been lost, it seems unlikely that the whole New Testament was ever translated into the language. There is evidence, however, that portions of it had been rendered into Cornish by the middle of the sixteenth century. The speakers of Middle Cornish were in any case no strangers to the Bible. The surviving Middle Cornish texts deal almost exclusively with biblical and religious themes and there are passages in the Passion Poem and the Ordinalia that are almost verbatim quotations from the gospels. John Tregear’s Cornish translations (ca. 1560) of Edmund Bonner’s Homilies are also full of short passages in Cornish translated from the Vulgate text of the New Testament. The Late Cornish writers were also fond of the New Testament. Two chapters of St Matthew, for example, survive from the hand of William Rowe of Sancreed (ﬂ. 1650-1690).

Since the beginning of the Cornish revival parts of the New Testament have been rendered into Cornish. Henry Jenner translated John 5:1-14 as early as 1918 and 1936 A. S. D. Smith produced his own translation of St Mark’s gospel, a revised edition being published by Talek (E. G. R. Hooper) in 1960. A translation of St Matthew by Gwas Cadoc (D. R. Evans) appeared in 1975 and a version of St John by Gwas Kevardhu (John Page) in 1984. Ray Edwards published his translation of Revelation and of a number of epistles in 1986, and the translation by Talek of St Luke appeared in 1989. Furthermore the Cornish version of the order for Evensong contains a translation of I Corinthians 13 by R. M. Nance.

This is the ﬁrst time, however, that the entire New Testament has appeared in Cornish. The translator has attempted wherever feasible to incorporate into his text any part of the New Testament that survives in traditional Cornish. Translations of the revival period have also been used, albeit in some cases with very heavy editing.

The orthography, accidence and syntax throughout is Uniﬁed Cornish Revised, an emended form of revived Cornish that attempts as far as possible to imitate the Cornish of the sixteenth century and in particular the language of John Tregear, the writer of our longest prose text. No attempt has been made to “purify” the language of English borrowings, since the translator believes that the Cornish we use should reﬂect the language as it was actually spoken as an everyday language by Cornish people.